Luigi Ciuffetelli was 12 when his future found him. It was in the
form of a Pentax 35-mm camera that was a Christmas gift to an older
cousin.

“To me, it was just the coolest thing
ever,” Ciuffetelli recalled during an interview in his sleek,
fourth-foor studio in downtown Wilmington, Del. “So I borrowed it
and fell in love with photography. It just fascinated me.”

Growing up in the Stanton area, “I
was always drawing and painting as a kid,” Ciuffetelli said, but
photography quickly took over. His parents eventually got him his own
35-mm camera. “For me, it was a passion. I loved creating imagery,”
he said. “I was about 13 years old, so my subject matter was pretty
slim.”

Born in 1964, Ciuffetelli grew up in
the do-it-yourself days of home photography. He took his color
negatives to the local Acme for processing, waiting a week until he
could see what he shot. “I started building a darkroom in my
parents' basement, and taught myself to develop film,” he said of
his black-and-white work at the time. “I got a part-time job to
help pay for it.”

Ciuffetelli went to high school at
Salesianum in Wilmington, “and I wanted to absorb as much about
photography as I could. We had a family friend who was our local
priest at St. Matthew's Church, and he was a big-time amateur
photographer. My mother was ranting and raving one day about how it
was costing her so much money because they were paying for all my
pictures to be developed. She didn't get it. But he looked at my
pictures and said, 'This kid has got an eye.' He kind of awakened
everybody to the idea that 'Don't think he's just goofing off with a
camera. He's got something.'

“My art teacher at school saw my
photography and said that there was a school in Philadelphia that had
just started up, called The Art Institute of Philadelphia, and they
had a photography program,” Ciuffetelli said.

Seeking a direction for his work,
Ciuffetelli had come across the fashion magazines read by his two
older sisters. “I discovered Cosmopolitan,” he said, “and
I thought, 'Wow. I want to be the guy who takes these pictures of
these beautiful women.'”

Being a teenager probably helped stir
him in the direction of fashion models, but he laughed and said his
interest in the technical aspects of the photography was also a prime
motivation.

“I went to the Art Institute of
Philadelphia for their new photography program,” he recalled. “My
father was a laborer who worked at the News Journal. The only
person my parents knew who was a photographer was Fred Comegys. So my
dad thought I had to go take pictures for the newspaper.”

Ciuffetelli, though, took a different
path. After graduating from the Art Institute, he got a job with a
Philadelphia photographer who shot the thousands of images of
groceries for the Acme ads that appeared in every Sunday's newspaper.
“It was boring,” Ciuffetelli said, smiling, “but I learned a
lot about photography and cameras. I was working to learn more about
photography, and saving my money.”

He had connections with a photographer
in New York City, so, with youthful optimism, he moved to the city
and lived in a series of rented rooms with roommates while he landed
a job as an assistant photographer for Macy's. The store had an
in-house studio where their fashions were photographed. He was on the
set as models posed for the ads that ran in The New York Times.

“They trained me for six months and
then gave me a shot. It was a freelance gig, it wasn't a full-time
job,” he said, adding that the world of fashion photography was a
word-of-mouth network. He worked wherever he could for two years,
assisting other photographers in New York City, and eventually landed
a regular job as a photographer for the Macy's lingerie catalog, in
many ways fulfilling his teenage dream, he said, laughing.

“Even though all the models got paid
double-time because they were in their underwear, all the shoots were
confined to an inside studio or a rented house,” he said. “The
budget was smaller for those lingerie shoots, so they always started
the young photographers on them.

“I did a lot of catalog shooting for
Macy's, and then transitioned into doing some magazine work.”

Along the way, “I met Cindy Crawford
once and was an assistant on the set, and I photographed Rachel
Hunter for Macy's when she was just getting started,” Ciuffetelli
said. “Two months later, she was on the cover of Cosmopolitan.
I used to shoot Stephanie Seymour for the lingerie stuff before she
became a Victoria's Secret girl. None of them would remember me now,
though,” he added. “It's been too many years.”

For a decade, Ciuffetelli traveled in
the world of the beautiful people. Eventually, the job became a
grind, and he was beginning to transition out of fashion into
assignments for magazine work – Woman's Day human interest
stories, for instance. When 9/11 hit, “all the magazines turned
their stories over to 9/11 families and victims,” he said.

The magazine assignments to photograph women doing remarkable things
around the nation led him to spend two days following
chef/entrepreneur Paula Deen, working at her home in Savannah at the
start of Deen's career. After all the years of traveling when an
editor would call, Ciuffetelli stepped away from New York and moved
back to Delaware. He shot for Delaware Today and got his name
known in the Wilmington area corporate world. He married, and lived
in Hickory Hill in Hockessin, a home he still owns today, more than
20 years later. He is now divorced, and his three children are grown
and launching into careers of their own.

“I like Hockessin a lot. It's quiet,”
he said. “It's safe, the school system is great. It's just a cool
area to live in.” Living in the area also allows him to commute to
Wilmington, where he had a studio in a Union Street warehouse for
about a decade. He now has a sunny studio space on the fourth floor
of a rehabbed building on Market Street – part of a revitalization
effort at the lower end of the street. It's an ideal location with
everything he needs, including a picturesque exposed brick wall, a
huge white backdrop and plenty of floor space.

Now, Ciuffetelli works up and down the
Northeast Corridor, commuting from New York to Washington, D.C., for
assignments. Much of his work these days – “about 75 percent”
he said – is photographing lawyers for advertising or trade
publications. The challenge, he said, is working within the time
constraints of people who are frequently very much in demand, and
finding ways to get his subjects to step away from their desks.

“I sometimes come into the offices
looking around for good locations,” Ciuffetelli said. “Whenever I
go into a situation, my philosophy is that I don't want to be
predictable and I don't want to do what every other photographer
would do. Most people in the corporate world, they don't want to look
corny. Their image is everything, and they want to look
professional.”

Along the way, he has produced images
that make a bold statement – such as the three Philadelphia lawyers
he convinced to get into a boat for a photo in Super Lawyers
magazine. “Most law firms want to be serious. For that shoot, I
found out one of the lawyers was a rower, and the others agreed to go
to Boathouse Row for the shoot. Not everybody's like that, but these
guys wanted to stand out. When you have a magazine devoted to
lawyers, every picture in there is an ad.”

For a photo of sushi chefs for the
Delaware restaurant Mikimoto's, Ciuffetelli had all the men bring
their knives and stand in an impressive V formation with the head
chef in the foreground. The image, bristling with solemnity and very
sharp knives, is immediately arresting.

Ciuffetelli's images for Delaware
Today magazine have made his name locally. One shot for a story
on the School of Rock in Wilmington features an adult instructor and
a young student, airborne with his electric guitar in true rock-star
style. “The kid really jumped, a couple dozen times,” Ciuffetelli
said, laughing. “It wasn't Photoshopped in.”

Many of Ciuffetelli's images are of
doctors and hospitals, such as Christiana Care. The surroundings can
be cluttered with medical equipment and visual chaos, “but I try to
go for 'organized distraction,' or sometimes I can touch things up in
post-production,” he said.

Perhaps one of the pinnacales of
Ciuffetelli's career are his many images of Joe Biden through the
years. His association with the Biden family goes back to his
high-school days, when his aunt was then-Senator Biden's housekeeper
and got young Luigi a glamorous summer job doing yard work. “I
spent the summer of my junior year at Sallie's working there,” he
said. “His yard was riddled with poison ivy, and I had no idea. I
was just being covered with it. I remember going to Sen. Biden and
saying, 'I'm sorry, but I can't do this anymore. I'm allergic to
poison ivy.' As charasmatic as he is, he actually talked me into
staying there another couple of weeks.”

A decade later, after Ciuffetelli's New
York fashion career, Delaware Today wanted to feature Biden on
its cover.

“I got to photograph him again,”
Ciuffetelli said. “Now, he didn't remember me at the time, until I
told him the poison ivy story. He is an incredibly loyal person. And
he loves family connections. It made photographing him easier because
I had a connection with him.”

Ciuffetelli shot Biden several times
for Delaware Today, and his photo appears on the cover of
Biden's book, “Promises to Keep.”

Before Biden stepped into his job as
Vice President, Ciuffetelli got an unnanounced visit at his old
studio from the Secret Service, whose members checked out every inch
of the studio before Biden arrived for a Delaware Today shoot.

A couple of weeks later, without even
entering his name into consideration for the job, Ciuffetelli was
hired to photograph Biden at the inaugural festivities in Washington,
D.C. “I was shocked, but at the same time, completely honored. It
was a life-changing experience to be part of that historic event.”
he said. “I found out later that more than 1,000 photographers
nationwide had asked for the job, and they picked me. I didn’t
think I would have ever been considered.

“My job was to shadow Biden
everywhere he went, 24/7,” he said. “It was a quick week, but a
memorable week. I met him at his house on Saturday or Sunday, then
headed out on the train from Wilmington.

“Everybody who was close to President
Obama or Vice President Biden got a pin. It was on my lapel. They
gave us a new one every day. I could walk right over to him at any
point and the Secret Service would step aside if they saw that pin. I
was with him for seven straight days, I was in the motorcades, in the
press car, which was behind Biden. It was me and a photographer from
Time magazine working behind the scenes. I was at the
motorcade early, about 6 a.m., and we would be going until 1 or 2
a.m.,” Ciuffetelli said. “There was not much sleep, but the
adrenaline was going. There was so much going on that entire week.”

He was mere steps away from Bono and
Bruce Springsteen when they performed for the inaguration at the
Lincoln Memorial, and his images of the artists are striking.

“I ended up shooting about 15,000
images that week,” he estimated. “There are so many pictures
taken on a daily basis. They put me up in a hotel room two rooms away
from Biden. There were a couple of times when they knocked on my door
and said, 'The Vice President-elect is going to do a press
conference, and we need you right now.' I had to be ready.”

While the Biden chapter has passed into
his resume, Ciuffetelli remains a very busy man, but still finds
time for personal work, including landscape images of the places he
visits, and a series of manipulated, pop-art style images of
superhero toys that belonged to his children.

“Picasso and Andy Warhol are two of
my inspirations,” he said. “I wanted to combine what they did and
what I do. So I did portrait photogaphs of toys. I found a way to
manipulate them that was really cool. I printed them big, 4 feet by 4
feet, and showed them several times. I sold a bunch of them. People
really enjoyed them.”

Ciuffetelli has been in his current
studio space for about five years, after he was invited to set up
shop in the burgeoning Market Street art district. He did much of the
work himself, stripping out the sheet rock walls that had been put
over the original 1880s brick, and taking out the ceiling and
interior walls. “We got salvaged wood, and built as much out of
recycled material as we could,” he said. The studio has been rented
to other photographers and as party space, and the developers used
the finished space as an example of the possibilities of the art
district.

Ciuffetelli has perfected the art of
negotiation with clients who can sometimes be stuck in their
day-to-day image and reluctant to try something new for a photo. “We
have a back and forth,” he said. “I'll say, 'OK I'll shoot your
ideas, but then we'll do one of mine.' I have clients come to me and
say they want something different and edgy. I usually do a safe shot
and then a crazy shot, and I always think my crazy idea is better.
Most times, they love it when they see it, but then three weeks later
when they make their final decision, they go back to the traditional
picture. But I'm always trying.”

He works with digital only these days,
Ciuffetelli said, but he remembers when shoots were largely a
guessing game. “When we would do these big shoots, we had no idea
what it was going to end up looking like,” he said of the
pre-digital days. “We'd shoot Polaroids to check, but we'd still be
holding our breath until that film was developed the next day. Now, I
can shoot 20 pictures and I can see if I've got the right one. We can
stop shooting.”

The omnipresent nature of cameras today
has forever altered the way a professional photographer operates, he
admitted. “That's the biggest obstacle I've had to overcome in the
past three or four years. Everybody thinks they're a photographer,”
he said with a sigh, lamenting clients who will use cell-phone photos
in their advertising. “People will say, 'I'll just get my kid who's
in art school to do it.' I tell them they can do that, but I give
them my card because they're not going to be happy. I call that
clean-up work. I do a lot of clean-up work now. A lot of young
photographers don't have a sense of composition and style and
lighting. They just know how to work the camera and they can fix it
all in Photoshop. Well, you can't fix a lot of things in Photoshop.”

As his three adult children move into
their own careers – there's one son who graduated from DCAD as an
animation major, one son is studying to be a chef, and his daughter
is a college senior majoring in screenplay writing – Ciuffetelli
said he's led a charmed life.

“In my opinion, my biggest
accomplishment was showing my kids to the fact that there's more than
a 9-to-5 job,” he said. “I want them to follow their passion. You
can make money in the arts. I never feel like I'm at work. I've done
that for 30 years. Even on the crappy days, I'm still having the best
day. I get to take pictures for a living. I have no regrets.”